It was way more hassle than I ever envisioned it to be but I finally have real Internet access at home again. This whole process of changing ISPs was a comedy of errors and if something could have gone wrong, it basically did in the last few weeks.
My new ISP, Lightspeed Communications, originally said someone would be coming to my home to set me up on 6th of January. I was supposed to be up and running that day. Then that date got pushed to the 8th but no one told me that though. I had to chase down Lightspeed for the basic details of the installation. I have to say they weren’t very good at all about making sure I was informed of what was going to happen. The onus was always on me to keep phoning them to figure out how my installation was going to proceed. I’m not sure if it’s because they’re a small company or if they just suck at communicating with their customers, either way, it’s not a good way to treat people.
Anyways, on the 8th, some dude from Telus finally comes to do some simple wiring at my apartment. He leaves, I try to connect to the Internet and nothing happens. I call Lightspeed again and they say that I might have to wait up to 24 hours for Telus to finish their work. Of course, 24 hours later it still doesn’t work and so a trouble ticket is opened up with Telus. It’s the weekend by this time, so no one is available at Telus. So two days pass without any resolution.
This morning, someone from Telus phones me and says he’s ready to come up and take a look at the wiring. I let him in and show him what the other guy did. He takes one look and tells me the other guy completely screwed up the wiring job. According to him, it wasn’t even close to being right. The new guy was way better than the idiot from last week. He fixed the wiring job, told me exactly what he was doing, and stuck around to do some tests to confirm the line was working properly. The final test, of course, was to plug in the DSL modem to see if I could get Internet access. As is typical with my luck in life, it did not work. Since he’s not responsible for the modem and anything else from the wiring on, it’s now back to a Lightspeed problem. I thank the guy and he leaves.
I get back on the phone with Lightspeed and they figure out that I was given a super fast 25 Mbps line instead of the 6 Mbps line. The modem I got doesn’t work with a 25 Mbps line. As I mentioned previously, if there was a potential to go wrong, it basically did in this whole mess. So they tell me I can drop by their office to pick up a temp modem so I can get Internet access while they change my line over to a slower one. Luckily, the office is very close by and convenient to get to. It takes me about half an hour to get it and come back home.
I plug the new modem in and it works, to my pessimistic surprise. It takes me about an hour to configure everything so it was working like before but it’s all good now. The one silver lining in all of this is it will take a few days for them to downgrade my line. Until then, my connection is four times faster than what I’m paying for. I’ve already downloaded a few games and lots of torrents to take advantage.
Well, what was supposed to be a simple process turned into a bit of nightmare. It feels so good to be back online again. Alright, now let’s go find some porn.